


The Wedding Night

by halotolerant



Category: Wings (1977)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, First Kiss, Flying, Hero Worship, M/M, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-09
Updated: 2012-07-09
Packaged: 2017-11-09 12:55:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/455686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Alan sinks down onto his bed, raises his hip flask to his lips and takes a long swig - it burns in his throat like the start of tears.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Outside the window, the sun is setting beyond the airfield. The sky is red, and in the light the ground is red, and all the buildings and the few men moving about on the ground. Blood red.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wedding Night

**Author's Note:**

> **Additional Warnings Apply** : Animal harm in the context of farming, references to war and injury, dub-con as a character's fantasy

Alan sinks down onto his bed, raises his hip flask to his lips and takes a long swig - it burns in his throat like the start of tears.

Outside the window, the sun is setting beyond the airfield. The sky is red, and in the light the ground is red, and all the buildings and the few men moving about on the ground. Blood red. 

Alan first saw blood - proper running blood, not the bright, small glimpses in a grazed knee - when he was eight. He’d been up at the farm, playing a game with Lorna, and they’d turned a corner and seen the pig killed, although they hadn’t been meant to. She’d been scared, sorry for it, crying into her pinafore, and he’d put his arms round her, and whilst he held her he’d seen it over and over again behind his eyes, the hoop it made in the air, the blood spurting. 

He hadn’t felt sick, not really. He hadn’t liked it but that was all. 

Tonight is Lorna’s wedding night. Alan has no idea if she’s scared – that girl would have been, but Lorna isn’t her anymore. 

Charles never asked him to be his best man, and Alan is glad, really, because he can’t see how he could have borne doing it.  

Lorna isn’t his, not any more, but that girl was. Things that once were his: the girl that Lorna used to be, Beckett’s Hill, the day the pig died and the way she’d hidden in his embrace, and the day his father burned – no blood, not then, only the stench of it – and her holding him, fiercely, even though he hit her trying to get free. 

Some part of him wishes that Charles had asked. If he’d accepted, no one could have said he was scared. 

Scared by a wedding! Either Alan’s scared all the time or he’s forgotten how to be – either way, he never feels it as something distinct - but he’s not such a fool as to think this marriage is the worst thing that could happen to him. 

That’s what made him give his blessing to them, in the end. The realisation that he wouldn’t like it, that it would make him feel this rage and frustration, but nothing more. Whereas Charles, without Lorna, until Lorna, seemed liable to break like porcelain. 

All feelings other than anger, grief and hatred have for some months seemed muted and faint. Life itself is a humming monotone, unimportant, most of the time. Though rage can heat him up a little, Alan feels most alive, most vital and present and real, when he’s about to die, and he’s been there often enough to know.

Alan drinks again. Good stuff, or ought to be, Officers’ Mess finest – but he can’t taste the distinction, never could. 

The sound of the artillery is so constant that one barely notices it until it stops - as now, suddenly, it does. A bird starts singing from one of the fruit trees – some sort of very well-to-do French farm, this new billet, and Alan’s found hundreds of fresh, ripe red apples, firm under the teeth and bursting juice. Nothing here should be delicious but they are perfect, and most of them are just rotting on the ground. 

More whisky. 

Charles will undress Lorna, or will it be the other way round? Charles used to visit whores, but never gave the impression of having gained much by it. 

One hot day when Alan had been very young, he and Lorna had been wandering about together as they tended to, and had wanted to go in the water. She, though, had worried about splashing their clothes so at his suggestion they’d both simply stripped naked and waded in. Country children, used to animals, they hadn’t found the differences between them too remarkable or interesting, not compared to tadpoles and irises and mud pies. 

“Don’t you think it’s odd?” his mother had asked Tom, once, when she hadn’t realised Alan could hear from the kitchen. “A boy his age and no friends amongst the other boys? Just that Collins girl.”

Tom had laughed, throaty. “Early starter, perhaps the boy is.”

His mother hadn’t answered for a little while. Then, as if she was thinking hard. “Perhaps. Perhaps it’s because she – with his father, she was there too of course. And why not, after all? I’d rather that than him with those packs of lads going drinking.”

It had never been quite the same afterwards. Before, she’d just been Lorna, the one who was always with him, his friend. But they both passed fourteen, and her body was changing even further away from his, and if he met her to walk to Caxton, as they had done for years, she put on different clothes just for him. 

She was pretty, always pretty, and other boys envied him and somehow, in the new state of affairs, his mother was very happy to see them together. 

With a ripple of annoyance, Alan realises the whisky in the flask is running low, although he filled it earlier. He doesn’t feel any warmth from it yet, none of the easy fuzzy blur he’s seeking.

Next to the bed, he has a few pin-ups, a few girls in wisps of cloth or less. It’s what anyone would put by a bed, unless they were the kind who has religious postcards. 

The girls lie back, or peer from half-closed eyes, and _invite_ , as if they want to be touched, calling on some unseen man to look at them and lust. 

Alan sometimes thinks of all of the men, all over the world, buying the same papers and looking at those girls. All the men stroking the paper, looking at the half-smiles, getting hard and touching themselves. He’d laugh at them, at the sheer ridiculousness of the idea, except that once he starts thinking about it, he finds himself similarly afflicted.

In his mind, he’s tried to attach Lorna’s head to these paper dolls, more than once. Only then does looking at them feel shameful, almost frightening. Back in the days when he was allowed, encouraged, to kiss Lorna, he loved to hold her close, hug her and be next to her everywhere they could possibly touch – the memory makes him gloomy with nostalgia. But it had never been anything more. 

At _Ste. Marie_ , back in the beginning, he’d gone swimming with Charles more than once, and they’d lie in the grass after and soak in the sunshine, nibble grass and share toffee and laugh. So Alan can picture, more or less, what Lorna will see as Charles’ clothes come off, whichever one of them it is that removes them; the slim, muscled chest, the reddish-gold of the hair that runs down from just beneath his navel, the long worm of scar on his calf where he cut himself falling from a horse as a child. 

And Charles will be taking the beautiful clothes off Lorna, the fine lace she worked on Sundays for this day, all ruffled and edging her underwear, white and pristine, and Alan can picture both of them, knows how they both look when they flush, how each of them blinks when they’re shy. 

Alan never did anything with Lorna to make that white underwear a falsehood. Not with Lorna, not with Charles’ sister, not with anyone. 

Alan could be in white himself, only it’s likely to be his shroud before it’s a wedding dress – something part of that is more wrong than another part, he thinks fuzzily, but he doesn’t care to untangle it. 

The whisky is gone, and Alan still can’t feel it. His hand is shaking. He wants to break something, but there’s nothing to hand but his own pipe and the washbasin, and he’d never get another of either off the quartermaster. 

“Have the Hun broken through or is it some kind of music practice?”

Alan sits down again on his bed, and looks at the shards of his washbasin where they lie, all over the floor.

He doesn’t remember deciding to do it. 

“Target practice, sir,” he says, and is aware of Captain Triggers coming in, throwing Alan’s neatly folded clothes off the room’s single chair and sitting on it, astride, master and commander. 

Alan thinks the warmth of the alcohol is finally hitting home; the world is less painful, less awful, now, than it was a moment ago. 

Triggers is stripped down to his braces, looking warm – the stairs can’t have suited him much, not with his leg how it is, Alan thinks almost idly – and ink all over his hands betrays his evening’s activities. 

On the occasions when Alan had thought that Triggers was dead, he had felt absolutely nothing, in the way that if you were to step over the end of a cliff there would be nothing underneath your feet, and the nothing would feel like everything, like eating you. After Triggers had been rescued from the front line trenches in the final, disastrous days of the old C Flight, and lying in hospital fighting blood poisoning, with uncertainty over whether the leg could be saved, Alan had been in the air as often as the rota could stretch and his aeroplane could manage. In the strange cold that had enveloped him, hunting and killing felt simple, but had also never felt so powerless, so pointless. 

Visiting Triggers in hospital, he’d not been able to think of anything to say, and in any case Triggers had been asleep, exhausted with fever, until quite suddenly he’d woken and looked at Alan, quite brightly, and said firmly, “I’m not going to leave you, “ before promptly falling back to slumbering. 

Alan, stumbling out, had gone into the grounds and started running, round and round like he’d used to when he was pretending to fly a plane, and it was only when he’d almost knocked Lorna over that he’d realised she was there, and remembered that, it being the hospital, of course she would be. 

Once, losing Lorna would have devastated him. Once, it more or less had. She was his. Only she was his, and she was all he had.

Now, he knows that needing someone isn’t enough, that doesn’t let you own them. 

But it does mean, of course, that they own you. 

“Drinking alone?” Triggers asks - his voice makes it sound like Alan’s made some kind of wonderful discovery of great benefit to mankind. 

“Here, sir,” Alan says, and hands the flask over. Triggers raises it to his lips and swigs, the muscles working in his long, pale throat. He wipes the back of his hand over his mouth, afterwards, and sighs with pleasure. 

“Tonight’s the night, then?” Triggers says. He’s not a very kind person, Triggers, not in the soft, delicate, crochet-coaster way of parlours and women, commiserating losses and counting each other’s silver and candle-ends at the same time. 

Triggers is iron and steel and bloody, ragged edges, and the glint is fascinating.

Alan drinks again himself. 

“Peculiar woman, to choose Charles Gaylion over you,” Triggers observes, and Alan looks up, not sure if he’s being teased, because after all Charles has money, birth and a court-martial-free record, and honestly on paper there’d be no contest. 

Not that Charles’ family had approved the match.  Rather than wait for them to agree, he and Lorna had chosen a service in the chapel attached to the hospital. Most of the congregation had probably been other nurses and wounded men in search of something to do.

“But then, perhaps,” Triggers continues, with that look in his eyes, that eagle look that says he’s scented blood and not turning from a kill. “Perhaps you are aware of some attractive feature in Gaylion not vouchsafed to the rest of us?”

A part of Alan’s brain, still, wants to mumble _I don’t know I’m sure, sir_ and look at his hands, to be deferential and wait for the question to go away, in the manner a rabbit might hope a dog will lose interest if it keeps still enough, the manner a boy born to his station in life is taught for dealing with a man like Captain Triggers and his rounded vowel-cups of delicate meaning. 

But Alan’s drunk and hurt and two years passed thinking that kind of thing mattered, even as much as he ever did. 

“I didn’t fuck him, sir,” he says, looking up, and registers with interest the genuine surprise on Triggers’ face.

“And he didn’t fuck me, either,” Alan adds, spitting the words now. Crude, rude and real – Triggers is nothing if not a realist, and yet there’s the energy in him too, the belief that he can mould reality how he chooses and choose the reality he wants. 

Sometimes, some days, Alan can think of nothing better he could do than become a man like Captain Triggers. 

Once, he thought that that was all he wanted from Triggers – to learn to be him. 

Now, soaked in misery, in lust that is in itself miserable and pallid and pointless, he sees it all, like hawk flying over the battlefields would see them all – for all the sense it would make, for all the good it would be. 

“Do you want it, sir?” he asks, shifting on the bed towards where Triggers still sits aside the chair, staring at him with something like pain on his face, the fool. Alan starts unbuttoning his shirt, and his fingers are clumsy now. “Do you want it?” he asks again – here, deep and dark, a fantasy, culled from the pages of Thomas Hardy, the poor boy overtaken by the rich man in the open field, and told he _had_ to, and so there was no choice and no sin. 

The crash is Triggers pushing the chair over, coming towards him, lean muscle, pressing Alan down into the bed. Hot, hard, stronger than he might have thought – how funny, to be scared now, when nothing else is left to scare him, Alan might laugh soon. 

The weight of Triggers on him, hands firmly gripping his shoulders, getting over him, face scarce inches away, his breath hot with whisky vapour, Alan’s too, and soon, perhaps, mingling, a ceremony of their own; Alan is hard and Triggers’ groin is against his own and he moves, groans, cries out in pure frustration – the laughter, leaving his body, seems now to be tears. He blinks and Triggers blurs, and finally Alan sees him, staring down, that beautiful, stern face, hatched with lines of despair. 

“Don’t be a bloody idiot,” Triggers snarls at him, giving him a shake, and Alan hardens further, twitches up against his leg. “Don’t...” he stops, breathes. 

He’s hard too; Alan can feel it, even if he couldn’t see it in the darkness of his eyes. 

Lorna and Charles are only shadows. Triggers is firm and warm against him. 

“You’d break me,” Triggers says, softly, like the sweetest endearment. “You, Farmer, would break me, and damned if I wouldn’t take you down when I fell. Do you think I’d give you power like that? Over your commanding officer?”

Alan smiles at him with the most venom he can muster. “You aren’t my commanding officer anymore, are you though? You fell already.”

Triggers shakes him, then – and it is over before Alan can even notice – kisses him, if you can call it that, their teeth smashing hard, painful, quick into their lips as their mouths meet. Then he is up, moving, leaving. 

“I won’t survive this war, sir,” Alan calls out, and it makes Triggers halt but not turn. “You know I won’t, and I ain’t never had anyone, and who’s left but you? Who the fuck is left in the fucking world but you?” 

His mouth tastes of blood. That is common enough. His own, other peoples. The air reeks of it at times. 

“I’ll be here as long as you are,” Triggers says, after a moment, his shoulders bowed.

“You already fell,” Alan says again, softly, and gets up and goes to him, stands behind him, slips his arms round his chest and fits his groin to Trigger’s backside, and it feels, it feels, oh it _feels_...

Triggers turns in his arms but doesn’t break the hold – answers it, in fact, holds him in return, his arms strong even as his balance waivers and Alan automatically corrects it and there is a moment where they are almost dancing, swaying together. 

“Are you my death?” Triggers asks, quite seriously, and Alan thinks of court-martials and hard labour and blackmail and power and twisting of knives. 

“Are you my life?” he answers, and thinks of everything else that might yet be. 

\- - -

  
  



End file.
